Hick - Andrea Portes [48]
The bathroom is tiny with pink tile, pink paint, pink bathtub and a pink shower curtain. There’s glitter and lip gloss and Aqua-Net and diapers and that’s what throws me off. I splash my face and wonder if Glenda’s worried about me. I tip-toe out into the room in between and there it is, sitting off to the side underneath the window, a little yellow crib. I sidle over and peer in and am surprised, no, shocked, no, disappointed, no, worried to see this little tiny baby just laying there, sleeping soft, like it don’t know it got shit for a life yet.
I stand there, looking down at this little fragile thing and wondering what the hell this world has come to and thanking my lucky stars that my mama at least had the good sense to get a husband and a house with two floors.
But then I remember something, something dark and churning that I made myself forget back when I had little arms and little legs and my mama had a blue dress. I remember something and I would keep remembering, I sure would, if it wouldn’t make my heart fall out my chest and stop the earth from turning.
I can’t think about that. I can’t think about that part now.
I look around the floor beneath me and there’s nothing but clothes and make-up and shoes stacked on top of shoes, each one higher than the next. There’s a half-eaten pizza sitting in an open box on the table in the corner covered in what I think are olives, from first glance, and this is the part that makes you want to cover your mouth, cause those aren’t olives. Those are cockroaches, count em, six of em, having what must seem like a feast in their meager vermin existence.
I start to back out.
In the other room I can hear Sherri going on to Crystal about how she’s gonna take a pottery class and that she’s sick of this town and that it’s really time for her to get her act together and that she’s really gonna do it this time. Crystal keeps saying uh-huh, uh-huh and adding that she’s gonna go with her, maybe they could take the pottery class together. Maybe they could start a pottery store back in Jackson, cause that’s what rich folks like to buy and together they could design the store and they could make a fortune and they’re gonna do it soon, next month even, no, wait, has to be next year cause Crystal has that thing over Christmas, well, maybe in the spring then, but soon, anyway, real soon.
Eddie is listening, smoking a cigarette and gnashing his teeth. I come out of the room, the room with the baby and the heels and the cockroaches on the pizza, look at Eddie and take a stance.
“We’re leaving.”
Crystal and Sherri interrupt their grand plans, look up and look at Eddie, who just sits there, teeth gnashing.
“What’s the hurry?”
“The hurry is that I’m leaving and you can come or not but I ain’t staying.”
Sherri and Crystal look at each other like I am playing my part perfectly as the butt of their jokes. They try hard not to giggle but then Sherri can’t help it and she lets out a little snort and Crystal tries to shush her up but now they both start chuckling and trying not to and chuckling harder. And ain’t it just great when you can live your life so carefree and sexy and dressed up and high-heeled and who cares that you’ve got a baby in the back room with a pizza full of cockroaches and no hope for the future?
Eddie doesn’t look at me.
I look at the girls trying not to giggle and Eddie gnashing his teeth and the shitty wine carpet and the regal crest wallpaper peeling down the wall and Sherri scratching her ankles and I walk directly out the screen door, past the truck and down the road.
And as I’m marching off into the setting sun it starts to dawn on me that maybe my mama didn’t fuck up completely because if she had then maybe I would have been raised up in some room with flea-bite ankles and cockroach pizza in a house leaning over into the abyss. And maybe I am just a two-bit hick from the heartland but I do know one thing, my mama did not raise me to be skankin it in skanksville with the skanks.
TWENTY–FIVE
I get about